On one level, “Yellow Woman” is a simple but haunting story of a young, married Pueblo Indian woman’s two-day affair with a maverick Navajo who lives alone in the mountains and steals cattle from white and Mexican ranchers. The story is divided into four brief sections, ranging in length from four and a half pages to less than a page: Section 1 describes the morning after their first night together, and section 4 depicts (sections 3 and 4 are brief) the woman’s return to her home and family on the evening of the following day.

When the woman awakens on the first morning, the man is still sleeping soundly, “rolled in the red blanket on the white river sand.” She peacefully watches “the sun rising up through the tamaracks and willows,” listens to “the water . . . in the narrow fast channel,” rises, and walks along “the river south the way . . . [they] had come the afternoon before.” She intends to return to her pueblo, but she cannot go without saying goodbye. She goes back to the river, wakes up the man, and tells him that she is leaving. The man smiles at her, calls her “Yellow Woman,” and calmly asserts that she is coming with him. The night before, she had talked of the “old stories about the ka’tsina spirit and Yellow Woman,” stories of a mountain spirit who takes mortal women away to live with him. The woman apparently had suggested that she was Yellow Woman and Silva was the ka’tsina spirit; now the man’s words and actions assert that he is, in fact, the ka’tsina and that she has become the Yellow Woman of the stories: “What happened yesterday has nothing to do with what you will do today, Yellow Woman.”

She is drawn to the sexuality, strength, and danger of this stranger and to the potency of the Yellow Woman myths. She allows herself to be pulled down once again onto the “red blanket on the white river sand,” and then she leaves with him. It seems that he forces her to come, but she acquiesces complacently: “I had stopped trying to pull away from him, because his hand felt cool and the sun was high.” The woman’s pueblo has been out of sight from the opening of the story, and the farther she gets from the pueblo, the less sure she is of her identity or of her understanding of reality. As they travel northward, she hopes to meet ordinary people in order to regain her clear, normal perception of reality: “Eventually I will see someone, and then I will be certain that he is only a man . . . and I will be sure that I am not Yellow Woman.” They meet no one as they travel through...

(The entire section is 1045 words.)

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